Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

A street redesign costs 5-10 million (at the low end)

No. Brand new residential streets are about $1M/lane-km to build and better designed streets do not cost more because it's still all the same things just laid out differently. So tha $5-10M is 2.5 yo 5km of residential streets.

Add in some intersections, and 5-10M is totally ballpark for a typical complete reconstruction project on a 2-4 km residential road. And that is the low side, because a collector or arterial road will see significantly higher per km costs.

ASE equipment costs thousands, and signs for it cost hundreds.

Try tens of thousands for the camera and controller in the box, plus tens of thousands more to hook it into a municipal-area network so it can report back to the central servers. A lot of the stop lights you see around are old and are running at dial-up speeds or lower. Certainly not the megabit speeds needed for a camera to send back pictures at a busy intersection.

How many cameras do you think you need to cover a residential street to get the same effect as a proper re-design? This article places each camera at $50k per year to lease and operate or the City of Toronto.

Maybe we're looking at 10s of thousands here, still orders of magnitude less than roads.

As for how many cameras, not that many, we need signage indicating ASE is in place, plus not telling people where cameras are. If they are consistently getting fined for speeding, and don't know where the cameras will be, they slow down everywhere, we don't actually need cameras *everywhere*.

Also...roads absolutely have a maintenance cost. In fact, a top regional objection to better bike infra is maintenance and repair costs...

Not $50k/year per lane-kilometre, though.

So you're spending millions on a handful of cameras plus network connectivity that likely won't last the decade before neding replacement, or you can spend millions on a road that will last 30+ years, both to the same effect.

First of all, yes, 50k/km/year is totally ballpark for road maintenance. Between ploughing, replacing damaged signage/bollards/planter boxes, painting, sweeping, etc. Roads are extremely expensive.

Second, no, don't give me that BS. If we are paying 50k/year for a camera, then we're throwing our money away. There's no reason to use a "municipal network"...buy a rogers sim...this isn't complicated.

Of course, you mislead about the price, even if cameras were 50k as you say a "handful" (say 5-10) come out to 1/4-1/2 million, not "millions".

And no, roads also don't last "30+" years. Typical surface asphalt lifespan is 10-12 years on arterials and somewhat longer (say 20-25 years) for residential streets if we're lucky.  Even the IHT which saw very very little vehicle traffic and so very little damage, lasted all of 22 years before needing resurfacing. Typically many resurfacings are done between complete reconstruction which means a design is baked in for 50+ years, but we still spend a few hundred to a million per km of road to repave every decade or two.

We should absolutely redesign our roads better. But cameras are many orders of magnitude cheaper, that is why we are able to deploy more of them than we are complete reconstructions.

I don't even know how this is remotely controversial...it's pretty basic accounting to show they're cheaper...